RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that enables a system to employ a number of hard drives as a single logical unit. To put it differently, all drives are used as one and the data on all of them is identical. This kind of a setup has 2 huge advantages over using a single drive to keep data - the first one is redundancy, so if one drive fails, the info will be accessible from the others, and the second one is better performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among different drives. There are different RAID types in accordance with what number of drives are employed, if reading and writing are both executed from all the drives simultaneously, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and many others. Based on the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance may vary.
RAID in Shared Hosting
Our state-of-the-art cloud Internet hosting platform where all shared hosting accounts are created uses super fast SSD drives rather than the traditional HDDs, and they function in RAID-Z. With this configuration, several hard disk drives function together and at least one of them is a dedicated parity disk. Basically, when data is written on the rest of the drives, it is copied on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is carried out for redundancy as even if a drive fails or falls out of the RAID for whatever reason, the information can be rebuilt and verified using the parity disk and the data recorded on the other ones, so nothing will be lost and there will not be any service interruptions. This is one more level of security for your data in addition to the state-of-the-art ZFS file system that uses checksums to guarantee that all of the data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The SSD drives that are used for holding any site content uploaded to the semi-dedicated hosting accounts which we offer work in RAID-Z. This is a special configuration where one or more hard drives are employed for parity i.e. the system will add an additional bit to any data duplicated on this type of a drive. In the event that a disk fails and is replaced with a new one, what information will be duplicated on the latter will be a mix calculated between the data on the remaining drives and that on the parity one. This is done to make sure that the data on the new drive will be correct. Throughout the process, the RAID will continue working normally and the faulty drive will not affect the adequate operation of your websites in any respect. Working with SSDs in RAID-Z is an amazing addition to the ZFS file system which runs on our revolutionary cloud platform with regards to preserving the integrity of your files as ZFS uses special digital identifiers identified as checksums in order to avoid silent data corruption.
RAID in VPS Web Hosting
In case you employ one of our virtual private server solutions, any content you upload will be kept on SSD drives that function in RAID. At least a single drive is intended for parity to guarantee the integrity of the data. In simple terms, this is a special drive where info is copied with one bit added to it. In case a disk part of the RAID stops working, your websites will continue working and when a new disk substitutes the malfunctioning one, the bits of the data that will be duplicated on it are calculated by using the healthy and the parity drives. By doing this, any probability of corrupting data during the process is avoided. We also use ordinary hard disk drives that operate in RAID for storing backups, so if you add this service to your VPS plan, your content will be kept on multiple drives and you'll never need to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive failures.